“The New Spirit in Painting: Moving Beyond - Painting In China, 2013”.

　　The greatest stance, which Bertrand Russell enables for the visitor today, is to be able to interpret the present against a long and extraordinary past. “Chinese problems, even if they affect no one outside China, would be of vast importance, since the Chinese are estimated to constitute about a quarter of the human race. In fact, however, all the world will be vitally affected by the development of Chinese affairs, which may well prove a decisive factor, for good or evil, during the next two centuries.”35 For example he sought to describe China’s need to overcome foreign relations, to achieve universal literacy as a prerequisite for democracy, as requiring an understanding and acceptance of the difference between West and East. Democracy in China would he explained, require: “inspiring leadership, and a clear conception of the kind of civilization to be aimed at. Leadership will have to be both intellectual and practical. As regards intellectual leadership, China is a country where writers have enormous influence, and a vigorous reformer possessed of literary skill could carry with him the great majority of Young China. Men with the requisite gifts exist in China; I might mention, as an example personally known to me, Dr. Hu Suh. He has great learning, wide culture, remarkable energy, and a fearless passion for reform; his writings in the vernacular inspire enthusiasm among progressive Chinese. He is in favour of assimilating all that is good in Western culture, but by no means a slavish admirer of our ways”.36 “Russell’s socialism, then, did not blind him to what he saw as the good points of the Chinese tradition—an argument that then as now had both adherents and critics in China itself. By the traditional civilization, Russell meant courtesy, harmony, understatement, tolerance, a certain unworldliness—features that Russell directly contrasted to the Western lust for domination and that have perhaps become Orientalist tropes of a certain kind.“37 Given such learned observations as early as 1920, it is a great privilege to have been invited to take part in the ongoing dialogue of great import at this, another extraordinary juncture in China’s history. The artists we met (25 in all) can now be seen as a whole to epitomise the vast and wide ranging cultural manifestations of Contemporary Chinese.

　　A euphoric cultural pride and cosmopolitanism due to the dramatic changes wrought by global economic growth now enables artists to travel abroad, to establish large studios with assistants and to enjoy creative freedom, previously denied under the Communist regime. Contradictions were, unsurprisingly, evident in China, where in the rush to update and in doing so to create vast new residential and commercial areas, it happened that existing older buildings were and are being razed to the ground. An eviction order had been served on two of the artists we visited - their electricity and running water cut off – a menacing inducement for the residents to comply with. After 5000 years of a glorious cultural history artists in China are clawing back the vital creative freedom and dignity lost to the individual under the Communist regime in no uncertain terms. Society had been crudely turned on its head under Communism enabling peasants, workers and soldiers to seek to run the country and dictate the rules pertaining to all aspects of society, culture and its complex history without redress. Although the regime has not been replaced and although aspects of life in China have changed dramatically, other aspects have not.

　　Language and Nature are the two subjects that traditionally defined Chinese culture. A solitary oneness with Nature was once the most important spiritual pursuit for most Chinese people. The tragedy is however, that the spaces required for the individual spiritual pursuit no longer exist. The land is now so terribly polluted and wilderness areas destroyed by the rush to modernise and expand, the population so vast that people must live in urban environments where nature is conspicuously absent. In the studios of Shang Yang and Mongolian-born Su Xinping vast canvases make a mighty plea to the viewer to take action to end the wanton and devastating destruction of the environment. The work of Wu Jian in this exhibition can be seen to expand on this mode of thought. Nature may have become sentimentalised in some commercial forms of art in China, but Wu Jian presents the environment as an exploited wasteland, a world shorn of hope, paying the price of rampant economic growth. Implied too is the belief that the balance between the self and the outside world has been irreparably damaged, addressed by Liang Quan’s beautiful minimal works inspired by his Buddhist practice. China’s artistic spirit as evidenced in this exhibition then, provides a vital link to past times, an alternative to spiritual quests, and is more important than ever before in enabling the past to inform the survival of future generations. Such conditions are readily understood in the West, now victim itself to its own legacy of atmospheric decline and global warming. Thus it is all one world in the twenty-first century.

　　Ends.